


slouches towards bethlehem to be born

by straddling_the_atmosphere



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Magical Realism, Mythology References, Pagan Gods, Poverty, Skeleton Island as a character, Surrealism, hints of Treasure Island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 04:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15016379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/straddling_the_atmosphere/pseuds/straddling_the_atmosphere
Summary: It takes two weeks to get Flint off of Skeleton Island.Or rather, it takes two weeks for the island to let them go.





	1. i. the tower of babel

**Author's Note:**

> [slouches towards bethlehem to be born playlist linked here!](http://tomasortega.tumblr.com/post/174125720419/slouches-towards-bethlehem-to-be-born-a)
> 
> [maría's amazing gifset for the fic!](http://jamesemcgraw.tumblr.com/post/175173757247/slouches-towards-bethlehem-to-be-born-by)  
>     
> photoset edits by the incredible @jamesemcgraw
> 
> hope you enjoy!

_"I will stay here with you for an hour, a day, a year...while you find a way to accept this outcome so that we might leave here. Together." (John Silver, Black Sails, 4x10)_

i. the tower of babel

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/77320667@N08/29094732018/in/dateposted-public/)

 

Pirates are a superstitious folk. They grip rabbit’s feet during storms, kiss the plank of their ship before they exit. They speak in hushed tones about red-haired creatures with musical voices, about glittering scales that disappear into the water on a calm, moonlit night.

When Captain Avery sailed to Skeleton Island, it was with a crew like any other. They say that the island lured them in, that they heard unearthly wails and a woman singing. They say that one by one they all went mad, foaming at the mouth, eyes wild and bloodshot.

They say the island did it. The island reaches into your mind, hooks its tendrils of fog into your soul and gently swallows it whole, as tender as a caress, as deadly as a boa’s hug.

John Silver dreams of heavy breathing against his neck, of something chasing him. He sees the animal flash of white teeth out of the corner of his eyes, a glint of green eyes, hard and feral. He dreams he has two legs and he’s running but he can’t run fast enough—that breath is always there, on his neck, close and intimate like a lover.

He wakes with a start and rolls over, blinking in the dark. The night is quiet, an owl hooting softly in the distance, and crickets chirp quietly. He sees Flint still on that rock, quiet and resolute, staring out at the night sky. Nearby, he knows, are Hands and the others, watching them both. Waiting.

John Silver can’t kill James Flint. But he said he’d wait, and he will. He will wait for Flint to come around, to see the truth in what he says. To accept that he’s lost this war, but will gain something infinitely more precious.

Fuck Hands, fuck Rackham. He can give Flint this. As if Flint knows he’s in Silver’s thoughts, he turns his head, and Silver can make out the bright gleam of his eyes, lit up by the moon. He looks inhuman—his shaved head softened by the starlight, eyes glowing softly like the blades of grass surrounding them. Silver can make out the vivid red of his beard, the color that bleeds up to the dried blood on his temple. He is a predator in repose, waiting for the right moment to unsheath his claws, but Silver drops down onto his forearms, watching him. There was a time when he was afraid of Captain Flint, but that time is no more.

Flint looks away, back over to the coastline. Something cold slides up Silver’s spine and he shivers, dropping onto his back to stare at the fog as it creeps closer. Leaves rustle and another owl hoots, much closer this time, and Silver flinches, closing his eyes.

When he opens them again, the land is obscured by mist, grey and seeping and heavy, and Silver can see something moving in the distance.

“Hands?” he calls, and when there’s no answer but silence, his heart kicks up. “Flint?” he says, softer, the sound swallowed up by the white fog. The figure moves closer and Silver sits up, hands seeking out his crutch but coming up empty. Fear makes a slow thing out of him, throat thick and hot, the pressure like two hands wrapped around it and squeezing.

Solomon Little stands in front of him, as young as the day he died. His throat is wet with slippery blood, black and rotted, and his eyes are empty things, foggy and silver and unseeing. They still meet his own unerringly and Silver swallows, fingers clenching in the grass. Smoke drifts off him in slow puffs, curling softly around his wrists and ankles. He opens his mouth and more blood oozes from his throat, dripping down his shirt and onto the ground, a spot of dark in the white, white expanse.

“John,” Solomon says, mouth a gaping maw of a tunnel, dark and endless and Silver feels trapped, a fish caught on a string and unable to escape.

“John Silver,” he hisses, slow and trickling like a waterfall. “That was not your name when I knew you.”

Silver swallows.

“Do you remember me, John Silver?” Solomon asks, blood spilling out of his mouth at every word. “Do you remember what you did to me?”

“Solomon,” Silver rasps, flinching back when Solomon reaches out, hands ghastly and pale and steady. They are ice cold when they touch him, and from far away, Silver can hear a ghostly wail, the sound making the hair on his arms stand up. He can’t help the whimper that escapes his throat, trying to scramble away on stiff, heavy limbs, like he’s the one who’s a living corpse, body in rigor mortis.

“You left me to die,” Solomon snarls, his cold hands squeezing Silver’s throat. “Like a dog.” Silver’s vision flickers and he tries to grab Solomon’s wrists, his whole body flashing hot and cold. Solomon himself seems to flicker in and out and Silver’s hands go right through him, but the pressure on his neck is firm, dizzying, his heart rate kicking at his ribs like a caged animal and his breath raspy and desperate, vision going black in the corners.

“Please,” he manages to say, broken and cracked, just before the black overtakes his eyesight and—

—He is thirteen years old and all skinny knees and scabbed elbows and hungry eyes. The knobs of his wrists stand out sharply against his skin, like the lightest scratch will expose gleaming white bone. He sits on an empty barrel that still stinks of fish, watching the water and the other boys at the same time, chewing on a stale piece of bread. He is not Silver yet, but we will call him so.

There is another boy there, all dark eyes and curling red hair, gone brown with soot and dirt. He is sixteen, with a curling clever mouth and freckles on his bare, skinny shoulders.

“I’ve a story to tell,” he says in a loud clear voice, the kind of voice that has the rest of the boys, drowsy and half asleep from hunger and chill, sitting up. The boy grins, teeth sharp and white against the filth of his skin and Silver watches him, still chewing slowly on his piece of bread. Hunger beats at his ribs like a wolf in a cage.

“Get on with it, Little!” a boy yells from where he’s seated on a rotted piece of wood, something splintered from the docks that hasn’t been fixed yet. He laughs, leans forward, and the story goes like this:

One time, there was a boy at a bar. He was too young to be there, with his clever bright eyes and curling red hair, but the bartender paid him no mind. See, they had an understanding, him and the barkeep. He could steal coin purses as long as the man got forty percent.

On this day, there was a game going on in the back room. Money being exchanged, the clink of coins passing hands, slipping into cloth bags.

“Don’t try with these folks, boy,” the bartender told him, but the boy took felt that deep ache inside, the one that spoke of hunger, of the potential for a full stomach.

All it takes is one mistake.

“Oi,” a man said, grabbing the boy by the ear. The boy winced and tried to squirm away. There was the sound of a faint pop, then a thud, and everyone went still. A man opened the door, sticking his head out.

“Next volunteer?”

“I will!”

The man looked at the boy, who swallowed, and let go of his ear.

“You don’t even know what you’re volunteering for.”

“It doesn’t matter. Let him do it. It’ll get the thief outta your hair either way, won’t it?” The man’s companion said, grinning.

They led him into a room. There was a pistol on the table and the chair was still warm from a body sitting in it.

Solomon stared.

“The rules are simple,” the man who led him in said. “You put that pistol to your head and shoot. If it jams, you win half the bettings. If it doesn’t, well.” His mouth twisted.

Half the earnings...Solomon Little was many things, clever being one of them, but he was also alone enough, hungry enough, that it sounded like a damn good bet to him—

Solomon grins; Silver’s breath is short.

“They called me the Undead,” he says. “Did it five times. Jammed every time.”

“Where’s the money now, Little?” one boy yells.

“Pissed it off on whores of course!” His smile doesn’t waver, but it also doesn’t meet his eyes. An idea turned in Silver’s mind.

* * *

There is something wet on his cheek. Silver scrambles away from Solomon’s ghastly, ghostly face, then cries out, his wrist bending awkwardly against a root.

“Don’t you remember me, John Silver?” Solomon asks, and Silver feels a clammy hand on his jaw, forcing it up, those dead, dead eyes gazing at him. There’s a pistol in his left hand. An old one, one Silver has seen before. The gap that is Solomon’s mouth widens.

“Familiar, ain’t it?”

Silver swallows.

“Funny, that. It wasn’t a pistol that got me in the end, but a boy with a knife.” Solomon’s gaze is sharp, accusing, and Silver’s skin prickles with goosebumps. “A boy who convinced other boys I was hiding something. Something they could use.”

Silver remembers—he remembers watching Solomon everyday. Following him back to home, to whatever definition of home that meant. Remembers his stories of luck, of holding a pistol that never fired to his head, and all the money that entailed.

He still sees Solomon’s face that night. The coins in his hands spilling out onto the ground. The blood mingling with the cobblestone.

He wasn’t supposed to die. Silver had just wanted his money, that’s all. But he remember that Solomon had the same gun that’s in his hand now, a pretty thing, more for looks than use.

That he’d shot a boy in the shoulder, a boy who’d had a brother. A brother who was there, sharp knife in hand.

And Solomon lay there, throat slit in an alleyway in London, one of many anonymous bodies in the city.

Silver hadn’t meant for him to die.

Solomon’s pale hand tips Silver’s chin up and Silver can feel his breath coming fast, his skin clammy. He drags the muzzle of the pistol up his neck, slow, and Silver swallows, the cool metal making him shiver.

“Hold it,” Solomon Little says, and Silver feels his hand move to grab the gun without his say so. Feels himself press the pistol to his own temple. Like a kiss.

It’s so quiet around them, the fog encasing them in white, leaving his skin damp like dew. The only sound is his own breathing, harsh and loud in his throat, his hands shaking around the barrel of the gun. He cocks it and his breath comes out like a sob.

“Little,” he whispers, staring into those dead, dead eyes. The fog curls around Silver’s foot, and Silver nearly whimpers because he can feel the chill set in from the ankle that isn’t even there anymore. There’s a new kind of ache in his body, one he hasn’t felt in years—hunger, the sharp fanged monster that haunted his childhood, made him do things he’d come to regret.

 _Guilt goes away, if you let it,_ he thinks hysterically.

His breath is faster now, the pistol pressed snug against his skin. Something hot slides down his cheeks and he realizes he’s crying, silent, shuddering sobs shaking his frame.

Solomon Little crooks one finger and the pistol cocks in Silver’s hand.

 _No, no, no,_ Silver thinks, vision blurring through tears and there’s a wide, split-open grin on Solomon’s face, matching the slit in his throat bleeding black blood. Silver fires.

The pistol clicks, jammed, and Solomon laughs, loud and long, and Silver drops the pistol to the ground, hands sweating and trembling.

“Boom,” Solomon says, and Silver startles up.

It’s quiet. The fog is gone, leaving the early morning sky visible through the trees. The dew glimmers on the grass, and Silver can see Flint still on that rock, placidly gazing at the pink hues of the rising sun.

“Here,” Hands says in his rough voice, handing Silver some dried meat and stale bread. Silver knows their rations are nearly out, that the men will have to hunt soon. Silver hides a shiver. Somehow, he thinks that killing something this island would be a bad idea.

“Has he been awake the whole night?” Silver asks, nodding to Flint.

“He ain’t moved from that spot if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Have you given him food?”

Hands gives him a look and Silver winces. “Right.”

He pulls himself up, grimacing as he leans heavily on his crutch, another food pack in his hands, and he makes his way over. His ankle—the one that isn’t even there anymore, twinges, and a cold chill crawls up his spine like the fog did.

Flint looks over at him. His expression is tired and Silver studies the dark circles under his eyes, the lines on his face that make him look much older than his years. He frowns for a moment, realizing he has no idea how old Flint actually is, and holds out the food.

“You need to eat.”

Flint studies him for a long moment and Silver tries not to shift under his gaze. He finally reaches out and takes the food, though he makes no move to open it. Silver stays where he is, watching him.

He is so different than how he normally is. Exhausted. Defeated. It makes Silver taste bile in the back of his throat.

“I’m not going to throw it out,” Flint says tiredly.

Silver just looks at him. “Are you ready to leave yet?”

Flint’s upper lip curls. “No.” He says it like he’s waiting for Silver to break the promise he made, to take him by force or kill him and be done with it.

Silver just nods and moves away.

It has been four days since the confrontation. He can feel Hands’ eyes on him as he moves to the cliff’s edge and gazes down at the ocean, watching it crash on the shore. A dizzying feeling spreads through him—something dark and malevolent rising out of the water. He steps back, Hands gripping his arm, swallowing hard.

“I’m going for a walk,” he tells Hands, jerking away from his grip. “Don’t follow me.”

Flint’s eyes burn at his back as he stumbles through the woods, walking until he’s out of their sight. No birds chirp on this island, Silver has noticed. It’s always quiet, with hardly even wind to stir the trees. The absence of sound feels like something weighted, something pushing him down, like the ground wants to swallow him up, crutch and all.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking but when he looks up again, someone is there. A flash of a slow grin and that hair the color of copper, familiar and bright. Black blood staining clothes. Solomon. He holds out his hand and Silver stops, staring at him.

“Come,” he says, that unsettling smile on his face. “You passed the first test. I have more to show you.”

Something compels to take a step forward, even as his self-preservation instinct screams at him to _stay back. Run away._ Silver clenches his jaw. He hasn’t become something in this iteration of his life by running away.

He takes Solomon’s hand, his skin clammy and cold like a corpse, and everything goes dizzy for a moment. He is both in the forest, watching the still, eerie leaves, and on a farm, familiar in a way that makes his breath hitch. Solomon eyes him.

“Do you remember this?” His voice sounds kinder than it did before, but Silver can’t look away from the rot oozing from his slit throat. How can he speak when his throat is cut like that?

“I didn’t—” He didn’t know Solomon then. It would be years before he was the boy who accidentally took another boy’s life.

When Flint had asked him to share his past, this story had been on the tip of his tongue:

Once, when he was young, he was taken in by a family. Anything was better than the orphanage, anything was better than nuns that boxed his ears, switches on his shoulders. Priests that touched the back of his neck and children who stole his food until he learned to eat it so fast it gave him stomachaches.

The man who used him had a large, weathered face, and wrinkled hands, brown from working the fields. They had him for the season, the man’s fingers gone gnarled with pain from age.

His voice was loud, and his hands were heavy on his skin, leaving him with bruises and marks, and he’d thought it would be better than the home for boys, but at nights, when he’d shivered under the threadbare blanket and thin cot they had for him, he found himself missing his bunkmates, and how they’d curled together on the same beds for warmth.

James Flint was a man who should have been viscerally angry and loud, who should, by all accounts, have raised his hand against John, and if he had, he would have seen the flinch that John couldn’t have stopped.

He didn’t have to do that, it seemed, because the summer that Flint taught him how to sword fight, he twisted him deeper inside than hands could ever hope to.

 _I’m not angry with you,_ he’d said, voice soft, body stilling, and Silver realized with horror that he’d stepped back, panic lancing up his chest and making it hard to breathe.

He had never known what to do with a man like Flint, doesn’t even know what to do with him _now_ , grief-stricken and betrayed and gazing at the sky, who just looked at him with those tired eyes and said, _It has made me transparent to you_ , when he asked for one thing true of Silver’s past.

Silver stares at Solomon’s gaping throat, stares at the hazy farmland in front of them, a young, browned version of himself nursing a bruised jaw, stares at the forest trees surrounding them, and feels something inside of him crumble.

“Take it away,” he rasps, trying to tug his hand away from Solomon’s strong grip, but he won’t let him, eyes sharp and wild, fathomless.

“Do you remember what you did?” Solomon asks, and Silver chokes, eyes wide. The farmland changes then, to the kitchen he remembers. The man sitting at the table is both the farmer and not him. His eyes are too large, skin yellow. His teeth are stained red. And his hands, he remembers those hands, rough and calloused on his back, his skin crawling. There are too many fingers on them now, a dizzying array of them like a centipede, and he can feel them all _touching_ him, brushing his hair back from the vulnerable curve of his neck, remembers panicking, like he is now, breath sharp and weak in his throat, and the man touches him now and Silver lets out a breath like a sob, grasping whatever’s on the table—a knife, blunt, made for spreading butter and jam—and stabs it straight through his palm.

“I ran away,” Silver whispers, shaking hard as he watches the man—the _creature_ scream and Solomon’s hand tugs him back, back, until all he sees is the forest and he’s stumbling again, Solomon gone in a puff of fog, just like before.

 _I ran way,_ he thinks. _Like I always have._

Silver pants, trembling from cooling sweat. The sun shines through the trees and when Silver looks around he realizes he’s close to the camp again, with no memory of having walked there.

A dream, Silver thinks. A hallucination. That’s all it was. But when he wipes his hand down his pants, he sees that there’s a drop of black blood on his wrist.

* * *

It is day six. They are out of food. Flint has moved from the rock to the ground, leaning his back against that faithful stone.

“Hands,” Silver says, hiding the shaking of his hands by gripping his crutch. “Gather a few men to hunt. We need food.” He’d seen a deer a few days ago, though he doesn’t know if it was a deer. It had two heads and glowing white eyes. Its antlers grew together, curling like vines. But he hasn’t slept in a few days, so it’s possible he isn’t in his right mind.

When Silver sleeps, he dreams; he is running, as he always is. He has two legs and he can see Solomon out of the corner of his eyes. Fog suffocates him, tangling at his legs like roots, tugging him further and further into the earth.

So, he doesn’t sleep. When the men are gone, it’s just him and Flint. Flint watches him with half-lidded eyes.

“Flint,” Silver says.

“You look like shit,” Flint replies and Silver has to swallow a half-giddy laugh.

“That’s rich, coming from you. You are allowed to go to the river to wash yourself off, you know.”

Flint gives him a look. “Alone?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Silver closes his eyes for a moment and counts to ten, backwards. “I can come with you.”

When he opens his eyes, Flint is watching him again.

“I promise I won’t drown you,” Silver adds.

Flint snorts. “I know what your promises mean now.”

A hot rush of anger goes through Silver and he has to bite down on the inside of his cheek so he won’t bare his teeth.

“Believe it or not,” he says tightly after a moment. “This entire ordeal would have been easier if I’d just killed you.”

“So you’re just doing me a favor now, are you?” Flint does bare his teeth then, in a parody of a smile, but he’s too tired for it to be as menacing as usual.

Silver sighs. “Just come for a wash, would you?” To his surprise, Flint stands.

“What?” he says at Silver’s look. “The blood on my face is itchy.”

Silver shakes his head and leads Flint to the lazy river nearby. Even this is silent, barely burbling as it runs along smooth stones. He sits heavily on a rock and watches Flint wade into the water, those long fingers cupping it and splashing it over his face. There’s a soft fuzz of reddish-brown hair over his scalp, nearly blending into the dried blood. His stump aches and he squeezes his hand around the knee, just before his leg ends.

“You know, you could just push him in,” Solomon says and Silver’s eyelashes flutter, breathing out hard through his nose. Solomon gives him a sly look. “We both know you’re capable of it.”

“No,” Silver says quietly.

Solomon snorts, flicking a spec of dried black blood onto the ground. “Suit yourself.”

“What are you going to show me today?” Silver asks wearily. Solomon just watches Flint with something in his glassy eyes that Silver doesn’t like.

“You have a type, you know,” he says.

Silver stiffens, dragging his eyes away from Solomon’s red hair. Solomon smiles, like a tiger baring his teeth.

“Don’t think I never noticed. Little Johnny watching me with his big blue eyes.” Solomon hums. “If you kill one redhead, why not kill the other?”

“ _No.”_

When Solomon looks at him, eyes glittering impishly, Silver swallows.

“Did you get on your knees for him, too?” he asks, then flicks his gaze down at Silver’s leg. “Or, well. The approximation of whatever you can do.”

Silver’s lips curl in a snarl. “I _never_ —”

“Oh, not with me,” Solomon says breezily. “Though you wanted to.” Silver swallows back bile, remembering the line of Solomon’s jaw when he’d been alive, the clever curl of his mouth.

“But you did do it for others.”

Silver closes his eyes tightly, nails digging into his palms. The chalky taste that had always lingered in his throat all those years ago comes back with a vengeance, and he remembers— _remembers._

There had been men, after Solomon had died. He’d been hungry—the money he’d stolen from a dead boy’s body hadn’t lasted him long.

Silver can’t remember their faces but he remembers their hands. Remembers, _open your mouth for me, that’s a good lad._ Remembers the hot sting of humiliation, the way he’d thrown up after the first time, the second time. The fifth time. Remembers, still deeper, that it hadn’t even been the first time then.

 _Don’t tell your mother._ A hot, rum-soaked breath in his ear. He’d been eight. His mother had died a year later.

Solomon watches him with those cunning, knowing eyes and Silver wants to vomit now at the memory, his chest heaving.

“-lver. _Silver.”_

Silver opens his eyes. Solomon is gone. In his place is Flint, face and hands wet, watching him with barely concealed worry.

“Jesus Christ,” Flint says and Silver looks down when Flint takes his hand, gently, _so gently, how can he be so gentle with me? I betrayed him—I ruined him._ When he pries Silver’s hand open Silver sees what had him so worried. His nails have dug in so deep that his palms have started to bleed, red rivulets running down the lines of them. Silver watches as if from far away how Flint gently cleans him, then wraps a scrap of cloth around his palm, doing the same for the other hand.

“You know you use these to walk,” Flint says, nodding at his hands. Silver glances at his crutch and winces, knowing that’ll be painful later.

“Why?” he asks after a moment. _Why do you treat me like I’m worth something?_

Flint looks at him, tired. “I don’t hate you, you know. I don’t think I know how to anymore.” Silver is struck speechless, watching him walk away, back to the campsite. He scrambles to follow.

* * *

On day eight. Silver dreams, and when he looks down his entire body is engulfed in flame. As he opens his mouth to scream, the flame eats his entire leg, up to his hip, biting and harsh and he coughs, black blood dripping from his tongue.

Something awakens him. A hand on his shoulder, and he grabs a dagger, slashing it blindly.

Hands steps back, avoiding it easily. “You were screaming.”

Silver lets out a shuddering breath and drops the knife. When he glances over, he sees Flint watching him. He looks paler than before, troubled, great dark circles under his eyes like he hasn’t slept either. This fucking island is eating at them, all of them. He can tell his men want to leave. It’s just fucking _Flint,_ who still won’t let them.

Hands gives him some cold meat, cooked yesterday. The animal they’d caught had been too small to be a deer, but it hadn’t had two heads so Silver felt relatively alright eating it, even if he felt that the trees were looking down on him, judging him.

He takes another portion and makes his way over to Flint. He hasn’t known how to talk to him since the river, but he looks at Flint’s slowly growing hair, bits of red fuzz softening his face. Flint’s eyes look dull, more grey than green in the strange filtering light of the overhead trees, giving his face a haunted, palid cast. He opens his mouth to say something and then closes it, turning away.

The rest of the day is spent watching the men still search for the cache, a project he thinks is a lost cause. If Flint doesn’t want it to be found, then it won’t be.

The sun dips low over the horizon, turning the sky scarlet and pink, and Silver gazes at the red flames of the fire, listens to the sizzling meat, head leaning back against a tree.

“So, this is what you’re up to.”

Silver jerks up, rubbing his eyes. Madi looks down at him, unsmiling. Silver feels cold, suddenly, and the fire that was around him is no more, the night dark and total.

“Madi,” he whispers.

“Do you think I’ll forgive this of you?” she asks, tilting her head. Silver watches as she walks around him, losing her whenever she’s at his back. The hair on the back of his neck rises.

“You don’t understand,” he says weakly.

“No?” Her eyes are glittering and fathomless like the night sky, and Silver can feel the grass under his palms but when he looks around he’s no longer on Skeleton Island. He sees the Maroon Queen, Madi’s mother. Julius, circled around a table. He sees Madi off to the side, eyes dark and furious.

“I needed to—there was no other way.”

Madi bares her teeth at him and something in her eyes, sharp and quicksilver, makes Silver swallow. “Your captain and I were ready to die for this war.”

“And I’m not ready to see either of you gone!” Silver’s voice is loud against the total quiet, sharp and shivering. When Madi reaches out to touch his cheek, her hand cool and damp like dew, he leans into the touch.

“So trusting,” she says, then digs her nails in and scratches down his skin, an alien look of fury on her face. Silver cries out and sits up, panting hard.

The fire crackles nearby, warm on his face. When he touches his cheek, it’s smooth, but his beard is damp and wet. He looks at his fingers, and they’re wet with blood.

* * *

“Where the fuck is he?” Silver hisses, fisting his hand in a man’s shirt—he can’t even remember his name.

“He went—he went to wash off!”

“And nobody thought to _follow him_?”

There’s a damning silence and Silver snarls, letting him go. “Well,” he says. “Go and bloody _look for him._ ”

They’re all gone in a matter of minutes, except Hands, who watches him quietly.

“You too,” Silver says, jerking his head.

“Soon as he gets you alone…” Hands starts.

“Shut the fuck up,” Silver snarls. “We’ve gotten this far, haven’t we? Whatever that man and I had between us is dead and rotted in the ground. Now _go._ ”

Then, Silver is alone and he leans heavily on his crutch, just breathing, eyes closed.

“You know where he is,” Madi murmurs and Silver doesn’t even startle. He doesn’t know why Solomon is no longer haunting him, why Madi is here with her clever, damning words and sharp smile.

“Yes,” he says after a moment. Or, he can guess. He still knows Flint’s mind like his own, after all.

Madi touches his wrist and Silver looks at her. She’s hazy around the edges and she’s still filthy from being locked up with Woodes Rogers. Her wrists are bleeding.

He goes, to the river, walking along the edge. His crutch sinks into the soft mud and he flexes his hand, feeling the still-healing cuts pull. Fog encroaches on the edges, hiding the rest of the forest from him. Just him and Madi and the water, black like the sky, not a moon in sight.

“Where do you see yourself after all of this?” Madi asks after a moment. Her eyes glitter like the stars. “Surely, you don’t think I’ll take you back. Not after this.”

Silver wets his lips, his throat parched. _This isn’t her,_ he thinks. He doesn’t answer.

“You know, John Silver,” she says conversationally. “I know nothing about you. Neither does the Captain, I’d warrant. Nothing about your past. Your future, though?” She smiles a devil’s smile. “That, I can see.”

Silver stumbles, crutch slipping, and he catches himself with his hands, one in the mud and one in the water. As he struggles to stand, Madi watches impassively, then gestures in the distance.

“Look around, John,” she says and Silver sees the island but differently. There is the bright gleam of moonlight through trees that are larger, older, bushes that have grown thicker. There is a boy, thin and waifish with clever eyes, and he has his hands on a chest.

 _Hawkins,_ he hears in the distance and something inside himself heaves as he watches himself come through the forest. It _is_ him, with less of a leg, hair wild. There’s grey in between the black strands and his face is lined and dark, a wild, furious thing. Him but not. He wonders if this horror is the same feeling the man who stole the page would feel looking at him now.

“You can stop this from happening, you know,” Madi says, and Silver finally looks at her, eyes wide. “One truth to give to the island. One truth that haunts this place.”

“Will that grant me forgiveness?” Silver asks hoarsely. Madi looks thoughtful and alien, something about her features just that little bit wrong.

“No,” she replies. “But it will free you from this path.”

The entire truth of the matter is this: John Silver is nobody. There is no past because he never existed, never acknowledged, because he is an orphan, a thief, a crook, a whore, a killer, a pirate king, a husband, a friend. He is all the things they wanted from him–the nuns, the farmer, all of the men. Solomon. Billy, Madi, Flint.

And he is none of those things at all. He is smoke, intangible and hard to hold.

“Then, no,” he rasps and Madi’s face twists, that otherworldly something maring her features. Her jaw hinges and her teeth lengthen and Silver’s heart pounds in his chest, body scrambling back deeper into the water. He trips over his crutch again and nearly twists his wrist trying to grab it.

The thing—this _thing,_ no longer Madi, no longer anything but a large, seething shadow, rustling like the leaves don’t, burbling like the river doesn’t, moves closer and Silver opens his mouth to scream when he feels a hand around it, stoppering him.

“Shh,” Flint whispers, barely breathing. “It can’t see very well.”

Silver makes a little noise in the back of his throat and Flint uncovers his hand. The crescent moon finally peeks out between the leaves and he can see Flint’s face, wide-open and half wild, sees his hands, dark and stained, the scent of iron thick on Silver’s tongue.

It’s blood, Silver realizes. Flint is covered in blood.

The shadowed thing is on the river bank now, and Flint helps Silver to the other side of the creek, handing him his crutch.

“What do we do now?” Silver whispers.

Flint looks grim. “We run.”


	2. ii. the divine comedy

ii. the divine comedy

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/77320667@N08/29094744578/in/dateposted-public/)

Flint loses time, those first few days on Skeleton Island. He keeps wondering, keeps trying to pinpoint the exact moment Silver had decided to betray him. Thinks at first that it was when he wouldn’t trade the cache for Madi. But Silver would have needed more time than that, to concoct the story that he’d told Flint. To produce the letter, fake or not.

He doesn’t believe Silver. He can’t. Because if he does—if Thomas is _alive—_ what has been the point of his eleven years? Of raging and destroying everything, of Miranda dying.

The war he’d wanted is bigger than himself now. It has the hopes of Madi’s people, of _Madi_. This war that began in revenge and fury has turned into something that Flint had never dreamed it could. Something that Silver destroyed.

“Are you hungry?”

Flint looks up, meets those devil blue eyes. His stomach does ache, now that he thinks about it, an ache he remembers in his childhood, when his grandfather made hardly enough money to feed them both.

He doesn’t answer, but Silver gives him some dried meat and bread. He can’t help but think it would be easier if Silver just let him die.

“Are you ready to leave yet?” Silver looks tired too, his curls loose and lank, shiny with grease.

Flint feels a hot spark of anger deep in his gut. “No.”

Silver doesn’t react, just nods and leaves him be, and Flint watches him go, nibbling on his food quietly.

It gets dark quickly on Skeleton Island. He doesn’t know if he’s just fading in and out of sleep, or if it’s something to do with the strangeness of this place, of the oppressive way it seems to linger like a weight on your shoulders, how time doesn’t seem to work right. His eyes feel heavy.

“Quite a ways you’ve come, haven’t you?”

Flint jerks his chin up from his chest, staring wild-eyed at Admiral Hennessey. He looks just as he did that day all those years ago, heavy, lined face and a stern, weak chin. He even still has on that damn wig.

“Do you remember when I first found you? Plucked you out from all the others?”

Flint remembers _before_ that, the hunger aching below his ribs, how he used to pretend he’d eaten just so his grandfather could have food, especially after his eyesight became so bad he could no longer go out to sea, his hands gnarled and aching so he couldn’t pull the net up for the fish.

He’d been ten the first time he went fishing for his grandfather. Flint wets his lips, able to taste the blood on his mouth from lips so dry they cracked.

“Sixteen you’d been,” Hennessey murmurs. “A cabin boy for three years already.”

Flint inhales sharply, the view blurring in front of him. He can smell the salt of the sea from that day, the putrid scent of fish curling in the back of his throat.

Admiral Hennessey stands in front of them, younger, with less lines on his face.

“Why did you pick me?” Flint asks after a moment, obliging this moment of clear insanity. Hennessey’s lips quirk.

“You fixed a midshipman’s mistake, do you remember?”

Flint can see it now—the sailor had been Flint’s age, but from a good family so he was no longer a cabin boy. Dark-haired and smart-mouthed but terrible on a ship. Flint had fixed the knot before anyone could see.

“Why are you here?” Flint whispers. The ship’s rhythmic deck disappears from view but the sight of the sky he’d been watching from the boulder on the island isn’t there. He’s still sitting on something like rock, but fog curls around him. Hennessey’s eyes are hard.

“I think you know,” Hennessey says, and Flint shudders at the cold seeping into his skin when Hennessey places a hand on his shoulder and squeezes.

When he opens his eyes again, he can see the moon hovering overhead, stars fat and dripping in the night sky, like hot wax when a candle is lit. He runs his fingers along the stone and settles back against it. The rest of the night is dreamless.

* * *

It is day five. Flint has been watching Silver pace, watching him snap at Hands and the other crew members. He can’t remember their names. The salted meat makes him thirsty, parched for something more than what little water he has left in his canteen. He misses Miranda with a sharp, desperate burst of clarity, misses her kind eyes and her steely voice. He could use her direction now.

The men scatter at Silver’s words, whatever they are. Time was, that he’d craned his ear to anything Silver said. Time was he looked on him for advice, for clarity. They’d speak with one mind, and anything they said would come to pass.

With Silver, Flint had felt invincible, powerful. He’d given himself to something he had known in the back of his mind would never last.

A canteen is shoved in his face and Flint blinks, staring at Silver. His skin is sallow and pale, and he looks almost wild-eyed, the blue of them nearly hidden by the black. He has a long drag of the water, closing his eyes to let it soak his throat, feeling it drip down his beard, then he hands it back, wiping his mouth with the back of his palm.

Silver seems stuck, mouth parted, fixated just below Flint’s eyes, before he visibly recalibrates, shaking himself.

“Right,” he says softly and Flint narrows his eyes, watching as he limps away. The island seems ominous in the quiet, without the other men’s chatter to fill in the empty spaces where birdsong and trickling water should be. He looks up at the sky, covered in grey clouds, the sun struggling to pierce through them. It leaves everything with a sepia tone, like something from a dream.

“He’s just your type, isn’t he?” Hennessey and Flint flinches, breath hitching. He looks at him with wide eyes and Hennessey snorts. “You think I didn’t know about your…predilections before Lord Hamilton?” His upper lip curls in disdain. “You were my ward for years, James. I looked the other way because you were careful and you never brought it back with you to the job. But I knew.”

Flint feels bile in the back of his throat, gazing wide-eyed at how the landscape shifts in front of them, Silver and the island disappearing from view. He sees the bar he used to frequent in London, in the seedy underbelly near the docks.

He is eighteen and anxious, dressed in the worn rags of a man who isn’t under a naval ship. In this nameless tavern, he lets his proper accent go, lets his vowels go rounded and soft, like a poor boy from Cornwall. He drinks from a large glass of ale, watching the rest of the men at the bar. There’s a few he can see there—he knows the type. Restless, jittery, eyes always glancing towards the door to make a quick escape. Those kind of men that other men look for, the kind of men who gravitate to someone thicker, stronger.

A man places a heavy hand on Flint’s shoulder and he looks up, taking in the rough jaw, the calloused fingers. The heavy, thick cords of muscle down his shoulders. Lets him lead him to a dark corner, tug him into his lap. His blood feels hot, then, his heart pounding.

The man had called him pretty. Had told him to be loud for him, later in bed, had pushed him onto his knees, face in the mattress, and Flint, well. Flint was that kind of man.

He glances at Hennessey, at the faint disgust on his face, and it’s been decades, _years, lifetimes,_ and he still feels eighteen and terrified that the admiral would find out and take away his support, leave him floundering and destitute.

“You were a good shipman. A good Lieutenant,” Hennessey says. “Shame what happened in the end. Those predilections of yours won out. They always do, with men like you.”

Flint snarls at that, lurching forward and Hennessey doesn’t even move, watching him impassively.

“Rage all you like,” he says. “You know I’m not here. Not really. I’m what your mind has conjured up.” The smile Admiral Hennessey gives him is a nasty one. “Perhaps a decade too late of regret, isn’t it?”

A gunshot ricochets out in the woods and Flint jerks his head. The small, hidden bar in London is gone, the smell of smoke lingering in the air. In his hand is a ribbon. The one he used to use to tie his hair back when he’d been young—silk and blue.

He exhales, his fingers trembling. It had not been a dream.

* * *

It is day seven. He feels—not better, not exactly, but more alive after washing, even if Silver had gone somewhere he couldn’t see. His eyes—they’d been nearly white. Flint watches the trees warily. There is something about this place, something about the stillness and the quiet, that is _wrong._ The ribbon from yesterday is tied around his wrist and he rubs the softness of it with his thumb. A reminder that something is happening that can’t be explained.

Silver sits not far from him and Flint leans his head against the stone, watching everything and everyone. He has moved to sit on the ground instead of the rock, the soil loose and soft under his body. Everything aches now that he hasn’t moved in a few days. He thinks if he tried, he could sleep until his body decomposed into the soil, became one with Skeleton Island and the cache, his secrets hidden as the island buried him alive.

“What do you look at?” Silver asks, voice raw. There are dark, heavy circles under his eyes and his hair is plastered to his head, from grease and the fine mist sprinkling water over them. Silver uses his crutch to gesture at the opening in front of him.

“The sky, mostly,” Flint says.

“Any answers up there?”

Flint thinks for a moment. “No. Just more questions.”

Silver gazes at him and Flint lets himself watch him back. He had lied yesterday, about not hating him. He does, somewhere deep down. But even deeper inside of himself, what he feels for Silver encompasses more than hate, more than betrayal and anger at a relationship so broken. What he feels for Silver is as heavy and tangled as the thing with Thomas hadn’t been. Being in love with Thomas had felt easy despite everything. It had felt warm, like a heated shower after a wet London day, or a good book curled up in a lush bed, Thomas and Miranda drowsily listening to him read to them.

His feelings for Silver…are not like that. They began in darkness, in deceit and trickery. In cunning. _Strange partners,_ he thinks ruefully, and lets himself wonder how he’ll tell Thomas about Silver, if what Silver has told him isn’t a lie.

“You said you couldn’t hate me,” Silver says quietly, his gaze questioning.

Flint gives him a tired look. “You know why, Silver.” _You’re too smart not to know this._

Silver settles next to him, though there’s just enough space between them so they aren’t touching. Flint keenly feels that distance suddenly, feels it in all the ways they never touched before. In the way their fingers had barely brushed when Flint had handed Silver his sword on the cliff’s edge. In the way his hand had hovered before he’d placed it onto Silver’s shoulder to comfort him, when they thought Madi dead.

“I don’t understand,” he admits. He sounds exhausted.

“It’s not a thing you can understand,” Flint says, softer than he means to be. There’s something fragile about Silver like this, something that still makes him ache in that same panicky way when Dooley had been about to pull the trigger and without thinking Flint had killed him instead. His one ally. “It just happens.”

Silver lets out a slow breath and tips his head back against the stone, closing his eyes. Flint studies the overgrown bush of his beard, how it hides the uneven, endearing curve of his jaw, the thin-lipped, clever mouth. He studies the broad nose and those fine cheekbones, sharp and pointed on a hollowed-out face.

 _I love him,_ he thinks with quiet despair. _God, I love him. Even still._

“It would be very easy to hurt him as he hurt you,” Hennessey says and Flint nearly flinches. He nods at the sharp drop a mere hundred feet from them. “You’ll land right in the ocean. A death you deserve.”

Flint swallows, closing his eyes. He can sense the way the water would feel closing in on him, peaceful. How he could let himself drown, return to the sea that has raised him. It sounds good until he remembers how Admiral Hennessey had looked at him the last time he saw him. How willing he was to cast him out. He opens his eyes and glares at Admiral Hennessey, who smiles, faint.

“Always did have to be the difficult one, didn’t you, James?” he says, and Flint can see his form fading, going faint around the corners. Mist rises from him until he disappears into the smoke.

When Flint turns his head, he sees Silver still next to him, eyes closed. He’s asleep.

* * *

On day eight, he watches Silver wake up with a ragged scream and he knows then, with a certainty he’s been forcing himself to not feel, that this island wants _something_ from them _._ He’s quiet when he stands, and he sees a man follow him at a distance when he walks away from the camp. He smiles grimly. Silver of all people knows that one man will do nothing against him, if he wants to run or fight.

As he stands there and pisses, a cool hand touches his neck.

“Shh,” Miranda murmurs. “It’s only me.” When Flint composes herself, he sees her, bullet wound red and vibrant at her temple, blood splatter still on her face. She wears the green dress he’d seen her in once in London, when he’d been so in love with her and Thomas it had barely registered.

The dress is wet, like she’d just come from the water, and around them, the island blurs as if he’s watching it through a haze of drunkenness.

“What more do you have to say to me?” Flint’s voice is shaking and desperate. “You gave me your piece, have you not?”

Miranda smiles serenely. “There’s always more to say, isn’t there? Especially between us.” She tiptoes her fingers along the slope of his shoulders, and he shudders at the cold feeling that seeps into his bones.

“I wonder if you knew,” she begins conversationally. “How much I hated you some days. For leaving me in that little prison shaped like a cottage. You, out there on the high seas with your rage, me, stuck gardening in a town that treated me like nothing.” She spits at his feet and he swallows, watching as it hisses and curdles in the soil. “I hated him sometimes too,” she says, smiling, still so soft and benign but for the hole in her temple still weeping blood. “For forcing me to promise that we’d take care of each other.”

She is watching Flint now, and he’s stuck in her gaze, a fly trapped in her web. “It is so much easier to love a dead man, isn’t it?”

“Miranda,” he says haltingly and she cuts him a look so scathing that his words die in his throat.

“I was pregnant, you know, on the trip to Nassau. Don’t know if it was yours or Thomas’s. I hadn’t been getting my monthly bleeds in three months.”

Flint makes a noise, anguished.

“Lost it near the end. You remember. How sick and pale I was.” Her lip curls. “You thought it was merely sea-sicknesses. Darling,” she says mockingly. “I’ve never been seasick a day in my life.”

“ _Miranda_ ,” he says in an agonized voice and she bares her teeth at him, suddenly not looking like Miranda at all. There’s something mean in her gaze, something glittering and inhuman and Flint takes a step back, then another until he hits a tree.

“You left me to _rot_ in that place, on that island. I _hated_ you for it,” she hisses and Flint takes those words like blows, feeling them hit him just under the ribs, bruising and tender.

“Oi!” A voice says, “Are you done pissing or what?” and Miranda is gone as if she was never there.

As he heads back to the camp, it feels like something is watching him, but when he looks around, nobody is there.

* * *

When Silver screams on the ninth day, Flint himself hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Something watches him from the shadows, and every second he feels something crawling on him, even though he’s seen no insects in the entire time they’ve been on the island.

He watches Hands wake Silver up, watches him breathe shakily and look up, catching his eyes. There is a moment then, when Silver stands in front of him, mouth open like he wants to say something. From over Silver’s shoulder, Flint can see Miranda with her arms crossed. The bullet wound bleeds down her cheek and jaw, staining the collar of her damp emerald dress.

Silver leaves before saying anything and Flint watches him go. Miranda is gone when he looks back.

True fog creeps into the island during the day, leaving everything wet and dark. His eyelids feel heavy, like he could drift off to sleep in the mist and never wake again, so he forces his eyes open and takes advantage of the confusion of the thick, ground-level clouds, slipping away.

Out in the forest, he sees a slip of green, a ghost of a laugh.

 _Come,_ Miranda whispers, and he follows her voice, helpless still even if he knows it can’t be her. He watched her die in front of him.

Up ahead, there is a clearing with no fog, and he slows, looking around warily. There is Miranda, in the dress she’d died in, so plain compared to that elegant silk of before. There is her blood, dripping down her face. Her wide, furious stare, uncompromising and wrathful.

She holds out her hand, silent. Flint takes it.

There are other figures in the shadows, and Flint shies away, closer to Miranda, though her silence is no comfort at all.

“You have blood on your hands, James,” she says. “ _Flint._ Do you know how many you’ve killed? How many you sent to death?”

Flint tries to pull away from Miranda but her grip is vice-like, and terror takes a hold of him, the kind that makes all the hairs on his skin stand on end.

Alfred Hamilton is in front of him and he can feel a snarl in the back of his throat.

“I was _your_ attack dog for this one,” he snaps to Miranda.

“Yes,” she says, unflinching. “And yet he is still dead by your hand.”

Flint bares his teeth. The minute he lets himself feel guilt for killing Alfred Hamilton is the minute he dies. Miranda just blinks at him, the blood turning black against her skin, and tugs him farther along.

Gates stands in front of him, neck at an unnatural angle. Flint’s breath comes out in a shudder.

“Hal,” he says softly. Gates doesn’t say anything, just watches him with dead eyes, a lifeless look on his face. His neck lolls and Flint can hear the snap it had made when he’d broken it. He flinches, remembering cradling Gates’s body in his arms, then Silver— _Silver_ coming in to—

Miranda digs her nails in his palm, derailing his thoughts. “ _He_ is not part of this story right now.”

She leads him further, passed Gates. There are crew members, some he doesn’t remember, some he does, all with those blank, accusing stares. De Groot watches him, a gaping hole where his ear used to be, still bleeding sluggishly.

There is Eleanor and his breath catches in his chest. Her pale skin is covered in dried blood. She has her arm over her belly, protective.

“I didn’t—”

“Your war did,” Miranda says. “Your war killed her.”

There are slaves he sold, still in chains, and their eyes are hard and furious, alive in a way the rest haven’t been, and he feels something thick stick to his throat, remembering Madi’s faith in him, how he hadn’t deserved it.

There is Joji, gutted through. Dooley, eyes wide and surprised still in death, a hand on his chest. Vane, even, who he failed to save, a rope still around his neck.

There are more faces, more names he doesn’t remember, and he’s shaking and sweating by the time they get to the end, where a familiar broad-shouldered frame stands, their back to them.

“Miranda,” he says urgently, trying to tug his hand away, but her grip is stronger than iron, stronger than a noose around his throat.

The man turns his head, golden-haired and bright, chains on his wrists.

” _Thomas,_ ” he breathes and Miranda squeezes his hand, nails digging into his skin.

She looks at him urgently. “This is where I leave you,” she says. The blood is covering her eye now, steadily dripping down her face until it’s half obscured, a horrible parody of those masked dances Miranda used to love.

“No, _please_.” _Please, don’t leave me,_ he doesn’t say, and Miranda just gives him a sad, pitying look with her one clear eye.

“Goodbye, James,” she says, blooding dripping down her mouth, onto his wrists.

A gunshot echoes and when Flint whirls around to look for Thomas and Miranda, they’ve both disappeared. In his place, there is another figure. Dark hair tumbling down like ink, wide blue eyes. He has no beard anymore, as fresh-faced as he’d been when he’d met him.

He is holding a mangled leg, bloody and oozing. Flint feels sick.

“My payment,” Silver says, voice whisper-soft. “Is it not enough to cross the ocean?”

His face is pale, blood dripping black from the place where his leg ends.

“I have nothing else,” he says, over and over again. “Please let me go. Let me pass. Is this not enough? Will you take more of me before you let me go?”

Flint has to turn his head then and he retches, bile burning up his throat. When he looks up again, Silver is gone.

There are still crescent marks on his palms, blood on his fingers.

* * *

He doesn’t make it back to the campsite that night. The forest has turned him around, and he’s  never been as good at navigating land as he is on the sea. He doesn’t sleep, curling up against a large hollowed out tree stump and listening to the condensation drip from the branches. It’s the only sound on the whole island. The fog has lifted but the dark is total, complete, and no moon shines as far as he can tell.

Flint stays there for a few hours before he gets too restless and steps out, swallowing. There is a heaviness in the air that makes him feel hunted. The same sort of feeling he’d gotten like someone was always watching him.

“There you are,” Thomas says and Flint swears this time, too loud in the complete silence. It seems to echo.

The chains on Thomas’s arms rattle, but he looks the same—a sly, upturned mouth and fair, golden hair.

“Thomas, I—”

“I can’t tell you if I’m alive, I’m afraid,” he says, watching him with a benevolent curiosity. “The island doesn’t grant us those answers.”

Flint wets his dry lips. “What kind of answers does it grant us?”

“Oh.” Thomas waves his chained hands. “This and that. Come,” he says. “I have something to show you.”

And so Flint goes—he has never been anything but helpless to Thomas’s whims. As they walk, Flint flinches every time the chains clatter against something. Thomas looks amused.

“I look like this because it’s how you imagine me,” he says, wiggling his fingers. “Ever since your pirate mentioned where I am, all you see is me in chains, if you see me alive at all. Rather morbid, your imagination, isn’t it? Then again, you did take me to a hanging on our first outing.” There is something about the way he smiles, teeth too white, too sharp, that makes Flint wary. But it _sounds_ like Thomas.

“What are you showing me?” Flint asks after they’ve been walking awhile. Thomas throws him that boyish grin that had always caught Flint by surprise, and seeing it now is like the bullet to the gut that he expected when Silver drew his gun all those days ago.

“Come,” is all he says, and Flint’s legs suddenly feel cold. They’re in the river. Thomas stops and watches him, smiling in that way that Flint can’t decipher. Overhead, the moon comes out, casting enough light that Flint can see Thomas’s face—the soft curve of his jaw, the fluff of his hair, silver in the moonlight.

“Look down, my darling,” Thomas says in a low, musical voice, and Flint drags his gaze down. His breath stops.

The river is _red,_ a rusty dark crimson he knows intimately, has seen on himself, has seen in his dreams. Has seen dripping down Miranda’s face.

“Look at you,” Thomas breathes in a terrible voice. His eyes are blazing. “Standing in a river of your own blood. A river of the choices you made. Can you survive the flood, my love?” he asks. His mouth curls into the kind of smile he’d never seen on Thomas’s face. Cruel. Delighted. He can hear the water get stronger, and the current pushes him more intently.

Flint grunts and slips, nearly falling in. His arms become soaked as he catches himself, and it even tastes like blood, coppery like a coin. The stones are slippery underneath his hands.

When he snaps his gaze up, Thomas seems taller, and his teeth more pointed. Sharp and dangerous.

“You can stop all of this,” the thing that still wears Thomas’s face says.

“How?” Flint chokes out, spitting out blood as the current rises higher.

“Give yourself to me.” Thomas’s voice is velvet, soft and plush. Flint is so tired. He wants to curl up in it and close his eyes and sleep, can feel his lids begin to slide shut, a soft touch on his cheek—not quite a hand, but something— _something._

He jerks back and falls into the water with a splash, and the thing no longer even tries to be Thomas; it snarls, teeth glinting like the bone of Randall’s leg when they’d chopped it off, like Silver’s too. It isn’t a creature, not really. A shadow, something _heavy._ He finds his feet from under him and darts out of the water, slipping on the bloody riverbank. The thing snarls then stops, trying to find him. Flint holds his breath, staying still.

“James,” Flint can hear, soft and aching. Thomas. _“James, darling.”_ He wants to go, feels the deep, stomach-pulling urge to do so, but then he hears another voice, a yell of great pain and terror. Something _human._

_Silver._


	3. iii. the dusty path to salvation

iii. the dusty path to salvation

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/77320667@N08/42917679792/in/dateposted-public/)

 

All Silver hears is their breathing, harsh and loud and discordant in the darkness. His lungs burn, his shoulders ache. He thinks if he stops, he won’t be able to move any further, his leg trembling with each step.

Flint is touching him, a hand on his lower back that feels so hot it’s like a brand, but Silver hardly has time to focus on it, not when he can feel the island watching them, menacing.

“Where are we?” Silver asks, so soft it’s barely more than a breath. Flint is alert, something about him fae-looking in a way that seems more at home here than Silver is. His eyes are startlingly green in the moonlight, face pale and silvery, and his fingers flex against Silver’s back. It’s good to see Flint looking determined again, Silver thinks with some grief. It has begun to rain, soft and steady against their skin.

“I don’t know,” Flint murmurs, brow furrowing. “This place…it doesn’t want to be mapped.”

“You act like it’s a living thing,” Silver says uneasily.

Flint turns his head and just looks at him at that, eyebrow arching up, and Silver swallows, dropping his gaze. He can feel Flint’s eyes still, then the hand on him nudges Silver forward.

“We’ll rest for the night soon,” Flint says softly. Silver nods, doing his best to stay quiet as he follows. They had lost their shadows far behind, but something malevolent sits heavily on his throat, makes him feel like he’s drowning. When he pants, he can see steam coming from his mouth, too wet to feel like the frost that escapes your body when it’s cold.

Flint stops after a while, looking at a large cave nearly overrun with green, curving vines with some unease. The rain comes down harder and he wipes his brow, squinting at the sky. Silver pushes forward.

“If we get eaten here, at least we’ll be dry,” he says at Flint’s look, sitting down on a stone inside and resting his crutch carefully on the cave wall. He groans softly, digging his thumbs just above his stump to try to stop the aching.

Flint stays at the mouth of the cave, a formidable silhouette against the flashes of lightning, then he turns around, running his hands lightly along the cave wall. Silver can tell Flint is wary and uncomfortable, but he can also tell Flint is tired.

“You should sleep, Captain,” Silver says, then winces.

Flint’s eyes flick to him at the use of his old title, but otherwise just keeps tracing a path along the wall, moving further and further in.

“Flint?”

He watches Flint begins to walk passed him, every line of his body intent.

“Can’t you feel that?” he asks and Silver can now that he thinks about it, now that he focuses. Something thrumming beneath the surface, something vibrating. _What is that?_ Silver thinks, but he doesn’t stand, too exhausted and drained, his broken body hurting. He listens to Flint’s steps, suddenly aware that besides the humming, everything is quiet. Even the rain is silent.

Silver loses time, a bit, lulled by the white noise, by the sound of Flint breathing. When he can’t hear Flint’s steps, he blinks in the darkness, pressing his hand to the wet mouth of the cave wall.

“Flint?” he calls, keeping his voice soft. There’s noise again and Silver lets out a breath when he sees the curve of Flint’s arm, barely visible with how deep in the cave he is.

“Silver,” Flint’s voice reverberates along the walls. “Come here.”

It takes Silver awhile, gathering the crutch under his arm and moving his stiff body, but he makes his way to Flint. He can feel Flint’s fingers around his wrist, startlingly warm and alive, tug him further in, deeper, and it should be pitch black by now but there’s something glowing in front of them, something that gets brighter and brighter even as the walls get narrower and narrower.

He can hear Flint breathing again, soft instead of harsh, and they’re so close he can feel Flint’s chest rise and fall, can smell him, sweat and warmth and _living_ , a creature of earth and ash, dust to dust. He’s aware of Flint in a way he hasn’t been since after he killed Dufresne, when he could feel heat coming off of Flint in waves, could feel every twitch of Flint’s fingers like they were on his skin, and _god,_ he’d wanted them to be. He feels that way now, the scent of Flint everywhere, the vulnerable nape of his neck soft and white and visible, made for Silver to sink his teeth in and leave a mark.

He jerks his head back with a little gasp, trying to breathe without fucking _smelling_ him, without wanting him, and he’s so distracted he doesn’t even notice when Flint stops until he nearly bumps into the solid line of his back. Then, he sees it.

Gold, glittering and damning as hell itself. Piles of it clinking together as it slips and slides against each other.

“It’s fake,” Flint says, startling Silver. Flint takes a step forward, into the gold, and walks right through it. It shimmers around him until he steps back again.

And now Silver sees. “It’s the Urca gold,” he breathes and Flint nods, looking resigned. He’d barely seen it from a distance, and then again in the throes of fever, but he begins to recognize the Spanish gold, how it looked in the fort where it was kept.   

“Why?” Silver looks at Flint.

“Why has this island shown us anything?” Flint says, his eyes glittering gold and green from the reflection, as tempting as any coin has ever been to Silver. “What would you have done with it, if everything had gone according to plan?”

Silver is quiet for a moment, watching the way the light of the false lanterns turn the coins molten. “Taken my share and run, probably.”

Flint doesn’t look at him and Silver studies the long line of his lashes, pale against the strange gold light. “Even then?” he asks. _Even after you’d saved me?_ he doesn’t say, but Silver can hear it as clearly as if he had.

He swallows. “I would have tried.” He’s run from things he’s begun to get attached to before.

Flint looks at him then and Silver sucks in a breath. He looks alien again, the features on his face sharp and ancient. That something fae-like that he’d noticed before, like he should be wary of accepting any food Flint might offer. Then Flint narrows his eyes and looks human again, and Silver relaxes.

“What would you have done?” he asks, trying to hide the shakiness of his voice.

“What I was always going to do,” he says absently and Silver’s brow furrows.

“What—really? The same war?”

Flint inclines his head. “The money was always to make Nassau independent. How we went about that…” He shrugs. “I had to improvise. Nothing went as planned.”

Silver lets out a huff of breath. “Then I definitely would’ve run.”

Flint eyes him, unsurprised. “I know.”

They’re quiet for a long time, both staring at the gold, at paths not taken.

“You would have stayed no one,” Flint says after a moment. “Forgotten. A ghost remembered perhaps occasionally for his clever mouth and blue eyes. Not like now, where they’ll make monsters of us both.”

Silver’s fingers twitch against his crutch. Once, when he was just a boy, he took care of a stray dog. It had been mangy, a mongrel of a beast with unsettling yellow eyes and sharp teeth. Silver used to sneak food from his plate back to the animal, who waited loyally just out of sight for him everyday. It was its friend, more than anything else had ever been.

One day, Silver had been on the street pick-pocketing and stealing for more food, and he’d dropped a coin onto the road. When he’d run to get it, he heard a yell and looked up in time to see an out-of-control horse and buggy careening towards him. Silver knew he was going to die then, had looked into Death’s eyes and taken a step into her skeletal arms when something shoved him aside and then yelped, a high, desperate sound of pain. His loyal mutt lay broken on the road, whimpering. The dog had died in his arms. Standing next to Flint, listening to him talk about _t_ _hem_ about _we,_ about war and winning and _legend_ , it feels like holding that dog in his arms. Feels like seeing the last of the light go out in those uncanny yellow eyes.

Silver opens his mouth to say something and then winces, the vibration from before starting again. The noise is a low, deep hum, reverberating from the wall and along the ground and up Silver’s already aching spine. Even the coins, fake as they are, begin to rattle as it gets louder and louder, Silver’s eyes widening and meeting Flint’s, and he reaches out, grasps Flint’s shirt, something wet sliding down from his ears to his neck, the noise like the world is about to cave in until everything goes dark.

When he opens his eyes again, the coin room is gone and Flint is sitting near the mouth of the cave, eyes closed. The sun has started to rise, pinks and blues staining Flint’s skin, and he watches without much thought, his mouth half parted.

“What is it?” Flint asks, not opening his eyes, and Silver jerks his head, clearing his throat.

“The sound stopped.”

Flint opens one eye this time, and Silver notices helplessly how it’s the same shade of green as the leaves dripping dew outside, as the shoots of green grass pushing in through moist soil.

“It did,” Flint agrees, closing his eye again.

Silver frowns and gets up, back cracking as he grabs his crutch. His hand comes up to scratch at his ear and comes away flicked with something rust colored. He stares at it for a moment and places it, remembering the wet feeling on his earlobes and neck in the room with the gold—blood. He shakes his head, wiping his fingers off, and steps outside, aiming to take a piss, when he goes still.

“ _Flint,_ ” he hisses. He repeats it again until he hears Flint grunt.

A deer looks at them, ear flicking lazily as it chews on grass. There is nothing spectacular about the sight, except that the deer has two heads and its eyes are a milky blue, no pupil. It has two extra legs, and one shifts up to scratch lightly at the other. Silver can feel Flint at his back now, his breath quiet and even.

“I think,” he murmurs, right in Silver’s ear. “That we should go.” Silver nods and lets Flint pick a path, trying to follow it.

He doesn’t flinch when he feels that heavy vibration again and hears a squeal of pain, then the crunching of bone.

Instead, he just stares at the tense line of Flint’s shoulders and doesn’t look back.

* * *

Flint is tired and hungry by the time they stop again. The sun shines high in the sky and Flint wets his parched lips, unable to remember the last time he ate. He doesn’t know how many days it’s been—time doesn’t work the same way on this island that it does elsewhere. The sun gives him no clues—it could be midday or much later as far as he knows. Silver’s breathing is close in a way his body has come to realize is familiar and comforting.

He thinks they’re both thinking about the same thing, the echoing snap of bone and the animal fear still lingering deep in his gut. Silver hands Flint his canteen.

“There’s not much left.” His voice is hoarse. Neither of them have had enough water, but he takes a small sip of it, rolling it around in his mouth before swallowing. It will have to be enough. Silver makes a small sound, something frightened in it, and Flint watches in dread as mist begins to roll in, blanketing the island in a heavy fog. Flint can’t see anything except Silver, the fog curling around their legs and through Silver’s hair.

“Captain Flint and Long John Silver,” a voice croons and they both stare at each other, wild-eyed. The voice is unfamiliar to him, and going by Silver’s expression, it’s the same for him.

“My, my.” Something walks closer to them. A woman, or a creature like it. Her eyes are the same foggy blue of the deer from earlier, two curling antlers growing out of her head, and her arms shiver in and out of view, reforming in the mist. “Even the gods tell stories of you two.”

“Is that what you are?” Silver asks, voice only cracking at the end. Flint is quiet, watching. She shrugs, somehow, more mist than movement, and it comes to caress Silver’s cheeks. Flint’s jaw clenches.

“Oh no,” she says. “I am far older than that. I am not something that needs worship to stay alive.”

Flint inhales sharply. “The island,” he says finally. “You’re the island.”

She manages to convey quiet amusement. “In a way,” she says. “You two are clever, aren’t you? Managed to take the world by storm. You and that clever woman of yours.”

Flint can see Silver bristling and the woman laughs, low and barely audible, more of a familiar hum, something that vibrates in his very marrow. “Oh, don’t worry. Your wife has many more things in store for her. You two, though. Your times of changing the world are done, aren’t they?” When she smiles, Flint can see bone.

“We just want to go,” Flint says and Silver looks at him in surprise. But Flint doesn’t want to lose his mind and become something like the creatures in his dreams. A spectre made to haunt and nothing more.

“You won’t be leaving here,” she says, and Flint holds back a shiver when he feels the cool drops of water as fog curls around his neck. “Well. Not all of you.”

Her ghostly eyes flick to Silver. “He knows the way to end this. He has been offered it before.”

Silver goes pale. “It wasn’t a guarantee!”

“Not for your future, no. But it will get you away from here.” She begins to fade, little by little, her voice deep like the swell of the ocean. “I don’t need to be worshipped,” she says, the rumble of an earthquake. “But I do require sacrifice.”

Her voice trails off as she disappears, and they are still stuck in thick, deep fog.

“Usually this fades by now,” he says, reaching through. He can feel leaves and branches, but he can’t see a thing.

“This has happened to you, too?”

Flint gives him a look, taking a careful step forward. He stumbles on a rock. “Of course it has.” He holds out his arms, his skin still stained red from the river.

Silver swallows. “Right.”

When Flint nearly trips over a root he sighs, stopping. “We can’t move in this.” He glances at Silver, who hasn’t so much as taken a step. “She said you know.”

Silver stares down at his hands, and Flint can see the furrow of his brow that means he’s thinking hard. Time was, he’d been endeared by that expression. He still is.

“A truth,” he says finally. “We have to give it a truth.”

“I’ve given you all my truths,” Flint replies, watching him carefully.

Silver lets out a slow breath and meets his gaze. It’s wild like it had been on that day, what seems like so long ago. When Silver had put a gun to his chest, his wrist shaking with tremors.

 _"I_ have to give it a truth.”

Flint waits. He doesn’t know how long he waits, only that his clothes cling to him, damp and itchy, and his head beings to feel heavy. He sits down blindly, managing to find a rock, watching Silver wrestle with something, his head bowed.

If time passes, he doesn’t know how much of it does. There is no sky here, no moon or sun. There is only mist and Silver. There is only them in this world of white, illuminated.

Flint feels hungry and thirsty, but mostly he’s tired, and he closes his eyes after a moment, sinking into the warmth of the blanket of fog surrounding him, following that path that coaxes him down, _come, come, lay with us. You deserve to rest._ Curious glowing eyes in the mist, luminous and green like fireflies.

He jerks awake, Silver calling his name. “ _Get up_ ,” he says urgently, tugging at Flint’s shoulder.

“What?” he asks muzzily.

“It was taking you." He watches Flint with wide, wary eyes. Flint yawns widely, just wanting to sleep again. “Stay awake, Captain.”

“Talk to me, then,” Flint mumbles. When he dies, or leaves, or whatever happens, he’ll miss Silver’s voice. There’s a pause.

“I have a truth for you, Captain.”

Flint squints at him, studying the soft curve of his ear, the gentle way his neck slopes down. The curls like dripping ink over his shoulders. Silver opens his mouth, then closes it, giving Flint a flash of his teeth. He swallows heavily.

“Here is my truth,” he says, louder. “When you asked me to choose between a war and a wife, it would seem like I chose a wife, didn’t I?” He looks at Flint, and Flint can’t understand why he looks so bleak. Silver _won_ , didn’t he? “But I didn’t. I chose you _and_ her over a war.”

Flint is quiet for a long time. “What?” he rasps.

“I once asked you how to look at two points in space at the same time. Do you remember that?”

Flint remembers Silver’s flush from exertion, his bright grin and bashful face. How Silver couldn’t stop looking at his eyes. He nods.

“I’m looking now,” he says. “And I can’t see any way for either of you to make it out of this alive. And I can’t have that. Do you understand?”

Flint watches him, reeling inside. That means—that can’t be—but.

Silver seems to mistake Flint’s silence for confusion and he takes a breath. “I’d rather the two people I—I love more than anything be alive and hating me, than dead as martyrs.” He doesn’t look at Flint as he says it and Flint swallows.

“Look at me,” he says after a long silence. Silver stares at the ground. “Dammit, Silver, _look at me.”_ Silver does so, looking as wild as a cornered animal, liable to lash out if Flint makes the wrong move. “You took our choices from us. It will chafe her longer than me.” He takes a trembling breath and Flint can see Silver’s shaking lower lip. “But you must know that I…” He closes his eyes. It aches too much, the thing inside him that has broken open for Silver. It had only just begun to scab over when Silver had picked it open. Held it in his hands, still gushing blood.

Silver smiles tremulously. “A truth,” he whispers, the fog starting to lift.

“It’s in the cache,” Flint says helplessly. “Rackham once told me the cache wasn’t just a chest full of jewels.” _If your man is unsuccessful in seeing to his rescue, Charles Vane's death is inside that box,_ he remembers Rackham telling him. _Along with my good name, along with her lost love, along with your late quartermaster's life. And all the awful sacrifices made to assemble that box, now apart of its contents, and those things...those sacred things, that I trust in no man's hands_ . “Vane’s death, Gates’s life. Bonny’s love.” He looks at Silver, eyes wide. _You,_ he doesn’t say. Silver looks pained, like Flint has knifed him in the gut.

“Is that what you’re sacrificing?” Silver whispers.

“You forced my hand,” Flint says hoarsely. “I would have been happy being your partner until they put me into the ground.”

By now, the mist has lifted completely. Silver slumps against a tree, breathing shakily.

“I can’t sacrifice you.” Silver sounds pained. “That’s why I’m doing this.”

Flint can see the slope of the sand now, the shore. He feels weak, and he doesn’t know how many days it’s been. There is a ship there, still anchored.

“I know,” Flint says quietly, as they move towards the ship. It floats eerily, still and silent, like the abandoned ship they’d boarded once this year. Something dead. A rowboat is in the sand, two oars resting inside of it.

 _Do you have payment?_ Flint thinks almost hysterically, remembering the river of blood, of rowing Miranda through the afterlife. Of Silver’s sallow, bare face holding his own decomposing leg. _I’ve given you all I have._

Flint pushes them off, and Silver frowns at the ship. There isn’t a bit of movement, except for the flag waving weakly in the breeze.

Once they board, Silver reaches out to grip Flint’s arm, keeping him still, and he jerks his chin to the side. The crewmen all lay there, seemingly asleep. Like corpses, though they all have color to their skin, and their chests rise and fall.

Flint nudges Silver forward, the only sound the shallow waves hitting the hull and the dull thud of Silver’s crutch.

“This explains why they didn’t leave,” Silver whispers, looking frazzled around the edges when he finds Hands there too, crumpled on the deck like he’d taken one step and immediately collapsed.

There’s a rustle of leaves and something flies out from the forest, casting a long dark shadow along the ship. It sings a mournful song, low and haunting, the same tune as the hum in the cave, as the one right before the killing of the deer. Its wings spread wide, ink black, covering the sky like a thundercloud, and then it disappears into the clouds, leaving the weak sun shining. A shiver runs through Flint’s body, an echoing one in Silver’s.

Flint opens the door of the captain’s cabin and sees Rackham at his desk, bent over a map as if planning a course, fast asleep. Flint reaches out and presses his thumb to Rackham’s pulse point, then jerks back, nearly running into Silver, who grunts and grips his shoulder.

Rackham stirs and blinks, a befuddled expression on his face, and Silver’s nails dig into Flint’s skin.

He lurches up when he sees them, eyes wide. “What—how the—what day is it?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Silver replies steadily.

“I thought you’d killed each other,” Rackham says faintly. Flint sneers.

“That would be easier for you, wouldn’t it?”

Rackham glares. There’s commotion outside the cabin, the rest of the crew beginning to wake.

“So we go then,” Rackham says, eyeing them warily. “To Savannah.”

“That was the plan,” says Silver. “There are people expecting me.”

“He’ll have to be chained.” Rackham glances at Flint.

“No,” Silver snaps.

Rackham’s sideburns bristle. “ _You_ may trust Captain Flint to walk around unshackled, but I certainly don’t. My crew definitely doesn’t trust a man who has lived through countless mutinies and somehow always becomes captain again. And besides. You are not a king on this ship, John Silver.”

Flint just watches him, eyes half-lidded, and he curls his lip up into a little snarl, gratified when Rackham goes pale. He clenches his jaw and twitches his jaw to the door.

“Out,” he says. “So we can start sailing. Two men will escort _him,_ ” he nods to Flint. “To the brig.”

Flint grips his wrist when Silver opens his mouth to argue and Silver snaps his mouth shut, watching him.

 _It’s fine,_ Flint says without speaking, just watching Silver’s eyes go wide with disbelief, anger, acceptance. The truth is—Flint is tired. He’s hungry and thirsty and ready to leave this island forever. To go where Silver says they’re going, even if he still doesn’t quite believe him. Pale, long-fingered hands and shackled wrists twist in his mind.

Outside, most of the men are up, dazed and wide-eyed, but some—some of the men lay still, sprawled and unmoving on the deck of the ship. Silver’s hand tightens on Flint’s arm and he looks back to the island, where Silver is staring. The woman from the fog stares back at them from the shoreline, those antlers lethal sharp and pointed, as white as bleached bone, and she smiles, inclining her head towards them. Those fallen men never wake again.

In the brig, Flint holds out his hands. Silver flinches at the clang of the manacles around Flint’s wrist, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Flint curls his fingers in Silver’s shirt—still damp from fog and fear-sweat, smelling of the rotted earth inside that cave. He tugs him close.

“Another sacrifice for the island,” he says hoarsely and Silver’s eyes drop down to Flint’s mouth helplessly.

“Flint— _Captain_.”

Flint just stares at him, fingers twisted against Silver’s chest, and Silver cups cool, damp hands to his cheeks.

“One more truth,” Silver says softly, his breath along Flint’s mouth. He kisses him, lips cool like rainwater.

The ship’s sails swell, catching wind. Skeleton Island fades into the mist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the longest fic ive ever written that isn't a shot for shot rework of a movie. thank you again to maría for the gorgeous photoedits, and i hope you guys enjoyed!
> 
> come chat with me @tomasortega on tumblr and let me know what you think?


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